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Quick Start

This page walks through sending, saving and organizing requests. It assumes Mercury is installed.

The layout​

AreaWhat it shows
Top barThe workspace menu, the breadcrumb (workspace / folder / METHOD name), the environment picker, the theme toggle and the ⋯ menu
Sidebar (left)A filter box, Recent unsaved requests and the workspace folder tree
Editor (center)Method, URL bar, and the Body, Params, Headers and Auth tabs
Response (right)Status, time and size, then the Body, Headers and Cookies tabs — or the history list
Status barThe workspace path, and links to the command palette (⌘ K) and the shortcut list

1. Send a request​

You don't need a workspace to send a request.

  1. Click the URL bar (or press ⌘ L) and type httpbin.org/get. A URL without a scheme gets one: http for localhost, https for anything else.
  2. Press ⌘ Enter, or click Send.

The response panel shows the status, response time and size, followed by the body. JSON is pretty-printed and highlighted. While a request is running, press Esc or click the stop button to cancel it.

Requests you send without saving appear under Recent in the sidebar. Click one to load it again.

tip

You can paste a cURL command into the URL bar. Mercury fills in the method, URL, headers and body from it. See Import & Export.

On Windows and Linux, ⌘ means Ctrl.

2. Open a workspace​

A workspace is any folder. Mercury shows its subfolders and .json request files in the sidebar.

  1. Press ⌘ O, or choose Open folder… from the workspace menu in the top bar.
  2. Pick or create a folder.

Mercury watches the folder, so files you add or edit in another editor show up in the sidebar.

3. Save the request​

Press ⌘ S. Mercury asks for a name and writes <name>.json to the workspace root:

{
  "method": "GET",
  "url": "https://httpbin.org/get"
}

After that, Mercury saves changes to the open file automatically. See Saving.

To save into a particular folder, right-click the folder in the sidebar and choose New Request. This saves the current editor contents into that folder under the name you give it.

4. Add an environment​

Create a .env file in the workspace root:

BASE_URL=https://httpbin.org
TOKEN=secret-token

Choose it in the environment picker at the top right, then use the variables anywhere in the request:

{{BASE_URL}}/bearer

If the selected environment is missing a variable you use, the URL bar border turns amber. Hover over the URL bar to see which variables are missing. See Environments.

5. Organize with folders​

Subfolders of the workspace are collections:

my-api/
├── .env
├── users/
│   ├── list-users.json
│   └── create-user.json
└── health.json

Right-click a folder for New Request, New Folder, Rename, Delete and Copy Path. See Collections.

6. Find anything with ⌘ K​

⌘ K opens the command palette. Type part of a request name (or its folder) to open it without hunting through the tree, or type what you want to do — "curl", "format", "import" — to run it. ↑/↓ move, ⏎ opens, Esc closes.

Picking up where you left off​

Mercury reopens the workspace, the environment and the request file you had open. Unsaved edits are written to that file before it quits, so a relaunch puts you back where you were.

Light and dark​

Mercury follows your system appearance. ⌘ D, or the sun/moon button in the top bar, pins it to light or dark instead; the choice is remembered between launches.

Next​